Typos: the 21st Century Author’s Mark of Excellence by Alethea Kontis

 

Tim here. This time I have the honor and privilege of sharing a guest post with you from my dear friend, Alethea Kontis!

 

IG: https://www.instagram.com/aletheakontis/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/aletheakontis.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Thieftess

 

THIEFTESS: https://aletheakontis.com/2026/06/thieftess/

 

Hello, everyone! Alethea Kontis here. I’m a NYT bestselling, award-winning author and all that—most importantly I have the honor of being Tim Waggoner’s friend. Tim is not only a wonderful man and an excellent writer, he is also a positively superb friend.

Like me, he doesn’t mind collecting misfits.

I’m a publishing industry misfit who snuck in the back door. I majored in Chemistry with a minor in Marine Science, while also working as the Assistant Manager of the local movie theater. I graduated college at 20 and got a second job at a Waldenbooks. I made my first NY publishing contacts that fall, when the bookstore manager invited me to attend a little SF con with her over Labor Day weekend. It was called Dragon Con.

I haven’t left the publishing industry since.

I took my first formal creative writing class at 23: Orson Scott Card’s Boot Camp, a week-long intensive held at UNCG. It was an utterly amazing experience. After a 2-day workshop, 18 of us had to write a short story in 24-hours. The rest of the week was spent critiquing those stories.

When my turn came, four people said that they got so caught up in the story that they forgot to critique it. FOUR. I took that as a huge compliment.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that it also meant my life as a published author would be riddled with typos.

Typos are the curse of authors who write engaging books. If the copy editors or proofreaders get too caught up in the story, they don’t notice the comma that should be a period, or that “diffuse” should actually be “defuse.”

I was a copy editor at Baen for over 20 years. My work was excellent BECAUSE I don’t love military SF. I didn’t want get caught up in that story. That wasn’t my job.

Traditional publishers have rounds of editors. There’s your main Editor, the one who acquired your book in the first place. After that, the book goes to multiple copyeditors. Somewhere in that round, the Advance Reading Copies are printed for blurbs and reviews. Then there are multiple proofreaders. Sometimes typos are even caught in layout. Some are never caught at all.

Those typos are a true Mark of Excellence.

My first Mark of Excellence appeared in my very first book: ALPHAOOPS! THE DAY Z WENT FIRST. An Iranian friend at work stopped my office one day to tell me that while reading the book with his daughter, they noticed that “accordion” was spelled “accordian.” He asked if we had done this on purpose because it was “on the A page.”

Ha! Nope.

Bless him for being so kind. Every single one of us had missed it, from the editor to the art director, after several years and countless passes of the book. ALPHAOOPS itself has less than 500 words total. But Hussein caught it, because English was not his first language.

I laughed when I called up Candlewick and said, “STOP THE PRESSES!” Because who gets to yell that in this day and age? We managed to catch it just before they started the book’s second print run. Every time I read that book out loud, I think of Hussein and smile.

My other Glaring Typo was in DEAREST, the third book in the Woodcutter Sisters series. Harcourt Books was acquired by Houghton Mifflin and then went through a huge reorganization. My series was dropped, and everyone I had worked with on my books left the company. Luckily, DEAREST was already finished. Or so we thought.

It wasn’t until several years later, when I was listening to Katy Kellgren’s fabulous performance of the audiobook, that I noticed Odette the swan was introduced at the royal ball as “Princess Odessa.”

I asked Katy about it the next time I saw her—she actually remembered that typo. She had wanted to fix it, but Audible forced her to match the print book.

Oh, how I wish someone would have called me. Now that I have the rights back to those books, I’ve been able to fix the typo in print. But sweet Katy is no longer with us, so the typo in the audiobook remains. My Mark of Excellence.

Tim has posted some wonderful essays on AI recently, and how saving drafts, emails, and track-changes versions can serve as proof of non-AI writing labor. In a way, typos also serve this purpose. I’ve seen more and more posts recently from readers who are reassured when they find a typo, because it serves as further proof that their favorite authors and publishers aren’t using AI in their process.

Typos also have a long history of being engagement bait—remember that time when funny text memes flooded the internet, but they always had a strange typo somewhere? These typos were 100% intentional. People can’t help but to leave a comment correcting these memes. As you know, comments are engagement that gets the post more views…and subsequently more comments, because nobody actually reads the previous comments before leaving one themselves. The loop goes on, and the post perpetuates.

Yeah…even though I know this tactic will force the algorithms to boost my post, I can’t bring myself to do it on purpose. When I see a typo, if it is within my power to fix it, I will fix it.

Which leads us to another Lost Art that I suspect may become popular again: the Collector’s Edition. Not the fancy-dancy book with the gilt cover and sprayed edges—I’m talking about the upside-down airplane stamp. The Boba Fett action figure with the closed fist. The imperfect printed version that serves as inexorable proof that YOU were one of the first serious people in the fandom.

But I don’t know…are enough people reading these days to make that a thing?

I mean, if vinyl can be a huge commodity in the collecting world, who’s to say that books with typos can’t too?

What do y’all think?